I wish that I hadn't needed to spend the time I did building LiveWorld. In fact, I was both annoyed and somewhat puzzled that there was no system like this available already--an object-oriented system coupled with a powerful underlying language, with an interface that could support multiple moving objects and concrete viewing. This seemed like something that should, in this day and age, be already commercially available and in the hands of children. The absence of such systems is, I think, a reflection of the fact that we don't have languages that are oriented towards programming in such environments. And of course the absence of suitable languages is in part due to the absence of environments! I chose to break this no-chicken-and-no-egg cycle by building the environment first, partly to avoid falling into the common language-design trap of elegant languages that can't do anything tangible. Because of this, LiveWorld is oriented towards agents but not itself based on agents. Nonetheless, it has unique features which derive from the agent-based point of view. While the language and environment may be formally separable, the design values that inform them are the same.